Five or six hours were eaten up today as I chased a single story about a movie possibly not going forward, or at least about the finances being stalled for the time being. I wrote emails to and left phone messages with several parties to try and learn what’s up, and then I spent almost two hours on the phone with a guy I’ve known for years who explained that the story was not true although certain aspects might be sort of half-true in this or that respect.

The result is that I didn’t post very much today, which mildly irritates. On one level it’s exciting and enriching to dig down into a story and get to know the whys and particulars, but I have to crank stuff out no matter what. You have to shovel coal into the furnace.

I can’t write six or seven riffs (i.e., items, reviews, rants) for this column and also do the old John Horn or Patrick Goldstein routine, chasing down an interesting, sometimes labrynthian story and talking to the right people and taking notes and assembling the final version of the story just so and tying up the loose ends. I have to think fast and write faster and get out the six-shooter and be completely unafraid to channel Judge Roy Bean. A perceptive, passionate, fair-minded Judge Bean, I mean.

I should have linked/excerpted a Mike Fleming Deadline piece that ran four days ago called “Let Me Rant More Than Rave About The Film Climate In Hollywood Now.” I didn’t because…I don’t have a decent excuse but the best part is mainly about how to jazz up the Oscarsl

Fleming’s big idea (and it’s a good one) is that the Academy should use the Oscar telecast as a way to entertainingly preview the big wanna-see flicks of the coming year.

“Instead of Cirque du Soleil, what if Oscar promised an exclusive clip of Tom Cruise singing an ’80s rock number in his decadent hair band rock icon character from Rock Of Ages? A clip showing the giant dragon Smaug or a battle scene from Middle Earth from The Hobbit? A killer scene from The Hunger Games? One from Prometheus, Ridley Scott‘s revisit to Alien terrain? The Dark Knight Rises? An action scene marking the return of James Bond in Skyfall? You get the idea.

“All of these scenes would be exclusive, and this could become a tradition which could be promoted and would give a global movie-loving audience more to embrace than dresses that actresses are wearing.

“Insiders say this hasn’t happened because the Academy is intransigent in its fear that the integrity of the awards would be compromised. After all, they only just started allowing movie ads during the telecast. Hey, Academy: join the 21st century.

“And while we’re at it, doubling the number of Best Picture nominees has mostly added a few more films most people didn’t see. Why not create some other awards that honor the best comedy or best ensemble, which might give the unwashed masses something to root for? And when you have a year where Harry Potter was again ignored for Best Picture after an eighth installment that marked the end of an unprecedented achievement of an engrossing serial that grossed $8 billion, why not INVENT AN AWARD that gives the cast and filmmakers the chance to take a final bow in front of a grateful global TV audience?

There’s “a palpable lack of excitement for the Oscars” among industry players, he says. The basic problem is that the Oscar telecasy “is clearly hamstrung not by the imagination of its producers [but] the Academy’s unwillingness to get off its high horse and start showing audiences around the world what they really want to see.”

Fleming is basically saying that Academy honchos Tom Sherak, Dawn Hudson and Ric Robertson are basically what’s wrong.

“Why can’t the Academy face the fact that its stuffiness and stubbornness has turned movie’s most important night into the Super Bowl for dress designers? The red carpet pre-show has become a more anticipated event than an awards show that focuses too much on a Hollywood past the masses don’t care about, technical awards the masses don’t care about, and movies from last year that audiences either saw or decided not to see a long time ago.”

Rome Reborn 2.2 is the most realistic — painterly, Ridley Scott-ish — digital recreation of ancient Rome I’ve ever come across. There’s also a Rome Reborn 2.1 version that isn’t bad. I’m not visiting Rome this year after Cannes (as I’ve done three times over the last 10 or 12 years) but a friend and his fiance are honeymooning in Rome later this month, and I’ve been passing along tips and advisories.

I was alerted to this when the Toronto Star‘s Chantale Allick posted a story about this earlier today.

With N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes having drawn an analogy between John Carter‘s box-office crash and the great financial Ishtar disaster of 1987 (i.e., “Ishtar Lands on Mars“) and journos tweeting about Ishtar over the last day or so, it bears repeating that the Great Ishtar Bluray Delay saga, which I reported about last April, is still unresolved.

Most Los Angeles-based Sony Home Entertainment execs are away at an off-site meeting today, but Camilla Wilkinson, exec assistant to Sony Home Entertainment president David Bishop, has told me that the Ishtar Bluray is not currently on the SHE release schedule, which is firmed as far as May 2012 is concerned. So yes, a release could conceivably happen in the summer or fall of this year, but this has to be one of the strangest stalled-release situations in the history of the commercial Bluray market, absolutely and bar none.

Re-read what I wrote last April, but boil it all down and the likelihood is that the delay is due to some condition or stipulation or procedural hang-up having to do with Ishtar producer-star Warren Beatty, who is presumably still preparing his Howard Hughes movie for New Regency.

Two of the oddest aspects of the Ishtar Bluray saga are as follows: (a) the Bluray was released to at least one Toronto video store before the 1.14.11 release was abruptly cancelled a few days prior to that date, and (b) I know this for a fact because a Toronto-based HE reader bought a copy of the Ishtar Bluray off the shelf and sent it to me. I’ve got it right here, right now!

So it’s not confirmed and I’m not saying it’s likely, but it’s certainly possible that I, Jeffrey Wells, might be the only journalist residing on the North American continent who possesses a copy of the Ishtar Bluray as we speak. I just want to state this clearly so when some biographer or historian recounts this surreal saga, it’ll be understood that I may have been the only journalist to have owned a physical copy between January 2011 and March 2012, or at least to have reported about same.

Two weeks hence (Monday, 3.26) a Masters of Cinema Bluray of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew will be released. It’s my second favorite Jesus drama, the first being Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ, which Criterion is releasing a Bluray of tomorrow. My admiration is about Pasolini’s refusal (or inability) to play the typical Jesus game. His film is dryer than Scorsese’s, but they’re both about shaking the tree to see what kind of odd fruit falls.

Enrique Irazoqui in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

I’ve only seen Pasolini’s film once, but my recollection is that Enrique Irazoqui‘s Christ is the least tender and compassionate of all the Nazarenes in all the Jesus films. Pasolini took the dialogue straight from St. Matthew, but somehow I remember Irazoqui speaking to his costars in a very straightforward manner, like a mathematics teacher instructing students, and being rather stern and blunt about it. He seemed to always be saying “I don’t want to hear any more of your bullshit, and I’m sure as shit not here to add to the bullshit…I am what I am and the truth is the truth, and if I were you I’d listen up because I’m not here to fuck around.”

Remember when Last Temptation‘s Willem Dafoe tells Harvey Keitel that all the love stuff is yesterday’s news and that now he’s all about the axe? That’s what the Pasolini film is like all the way through.

You know what I’d like to see? A Jesus movie written by Quentin Tarantino. Seriously. It would be worth it just for the reactions it would stir from the Rick Santorum crowd.

Pasolini “employed some of the techniques of Italian neorealism in the making of his film,” says the Wiki page. “Most of the actors he hired were amateurs. Irazoqui was a 19-year-old economics student from Spain, and the rest of the cast were mainly locals from Barile, Matera and Massafra, where the film was shot.”

I was asked last week by Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale to come up with quite a few nominations for the 2011 Soily Awards…even though we’re smack in the middle of March 2012 with the Tribeca and Cannes film festivals not too far off. I told Stu I couldn’t go back to 20-effing-11 again and that I needed to be in the now. He said cool, and that I could always vote for the nominees when they break. I won’t post any further that that. Here’s Stu’s rundown.

I’ll post my yea and nays when he announces the winners of on Friday, 3.23. But I’ll tell you right now I’m not satisfied with the nominees for the Soily for Worst Picture of 2011 (i.e., “the most appalling, misconceived and/or unpleasant-to-watch film of 2011 — the more ambitious/pretentious, the better”).

Stu’s Soily panelists nominated the following: Abduction, Conan the Barbarian, Green Lantern, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. I say no to just those. Your Highness has to be in there, and so do 30 Minutes or Less, I Melt With You, The Hangover Part 2, Sucker Punch, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Republican Shadows.

But seriously — Stu has to run his 2012 Soily piece in January of next year. Certainly no later than early February 2013. And then post the winners a week or so later. Nobody wants to take any more bites into 2011 right now.

Every now and then I’ll submit to a horror film, but only in theatres and never at home. But a couple of weeks ago I was sitting solo at home and happened to watch Devil, a 2010 shortfaller that was written by M. Night Shyamalan. And I began to feel creeped out. Okay, scared. I started imagining what kind of fiendish predator might be lurking outside my front door or peeking through my window.

I didn’t think I was susceptible to this kind of primitive stuff, but I was. I am. I don’t think I’ll be watching another horror flick in my living room any time soon. Give me the comfort of watching my next horror film while sitting near a family of noisy, farting, coke-slurping Jersey Shore types inside a Weehawken plex. Actually, I remember being a bit scared by Paranormal Activity 2 when I saw at at the Regal Union Square, although not in a way I couldn’t handle.

The odd thing was that Devil isn’t that good a film. It’s just all right — roughly a 7.5 on the meter. But something about a demonic figure hiding inside a mortal inside an elevator and knowing that the big reveal will happen in Act Three…somehow this shit got to me. In somewhat the same way that an old Kim Novak TV film called Satan’s Triangle gave me the willies.

This despite a dopey payoff in Devil in which Satan is revealed to be a kind of moral prosecutor, sentencing mortals to eternal damnation for having done a really bad thing or two. C’mon…that’s not the devil. He doesn’t flash his crazy eyeballs and send you to hell like Robert DeNiro did to Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart. Even though, yes, this is the kind of devil that tends to get to you when it’s just you and your cats.

I prefer the company of a comme ci comme ca Satan, a “have a drink and don’t worry about it” kind of guy who can’t stand the priggish sanctimony of a judgmental God and Christian theology in general. He’s Al Pacino in Devil’s Advocate or…whomever, Mick Jagger‘s Lucifer in “Sympathy for the Devil.” A guy who’s primarily about logic and excuses and slacking off and working the angles and lines of cocaine in Cozumel. You know…Bill Hurt in Broadcast News.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Sony Pictures and producer Scott Rudin have nabbed remake rights to Katie Dellamaggiore‘s Brooklyn Castle, an inner-city social uplift doc (i.e., Undefeated meets chess excellence and budget cuts) that premiered yesterday at South by Southwest. The idea is to remake it as a feature with doses of grit, hardship and inspirational feel-good.

This will be Rudin’s second chess-themed film, the first being 1993’s Waiting for Bobby Fischer, which Steve Zallian wrote and directed.

The remake deal was orchestrated by Cinetic Media’s John Sloss.

Dellamaggiore’s doc is about I.S. 318, an inner-city school “where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level.” (It’s located at 101 Walton Street, which is just a bit south of the Lorimer stop on the L line — not exactly a bombed-out area.) The twist is that I.S. 138 “has the winning-est junior high school chess team in the country.” And yet public school budget cuts have put the chess program and its accomplishments in jeopardy.

Two Prometheus trailers have dropped so far — the first on 12.22, the second on 2.16 — and how they’re showing us a new teaser for a full-boat trailer that’ll drop on Saturday, 3.17 at 4 pm Pacific? I hate these extended dingle-dangles. I can’t be the only one who’s having this reaction.

I’ve never cared for the tendency of big-budget action film producers to hire interesting European actors who’ve recently become iconic figures among Joe Popcorn types to play a villain. Javier Bardem is an exceptionally charming and gentle fellow who thinks like a poet, but that cuts no ice here. Skyfall director Sam Mendes and 007 producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli are apparently thinking as follows: (a) Bardem won an Oscar for playing a creepy maniac in No Country for Old Men so (b) “we want some of that too!”

I’m sure Javier appreciates the paycheck, and I suppose one could do worse if you’re casting a 007 villain, but there’s nothing for baddies to do in these films except exhibit a certain perverse flair. There’s nowhere else to go. Bardem is playing more or less the same guy that Gert Frobe and Christopher Walken and Joseph Wiseman and Klaus Maria Brandauer and Christopher Lee and Yaphet Kotto played in their respective outings. It’s a box, a prison.

On top of which I’ve been nursing a dislike for Wilson-Broccoli for almost 20 years now. Wilson-Broccoli are two of the biggest lame-os who ever inherited a janitorial foothold in the action film racket. Trust me — I’ve heard stories about them from more than a few formidables. They’re caretakers.

To judge by this recently-captured photo from the set of Skyfall, the latest James Bond thriller starring Daniel Craig, Bardem has been working out and cutting out the carbs and the drinking, and is obviously adorned with blonde-ish hair (i.e., 007-ese for malevolent). Bardem was performing in a recently shot Skyfall scene in which his character, Silva, impersonates a London policeman. Who gives a shit about any of this? And yet here I am writing about it.

Skyfall will open on 10.26.12. The screenplay is by John Logan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. The great Roger Deakins is shooting it. I’m sure Mendes will make excellent use of his talents.

The Wikipage synopsis: “James Bond’s loyalty to M (Judi Dench) is challenged over secrets from her past. When MI6 is attacked, it falls to Bond to seek out and eliminate the threat regardless of the cost to himself.” I’ve read that Dench buys the farm.

This kind of writing and acting happens way too infrequently. In general, I mean, and not just in the case of 25th Hour screenwriter David Benioff. It was mostly luck, something that just dropped into Benioff’s head. He was smart enough to grab it and use it and that was that. All creativity, good and bad, just plops into your brain out of nowhere, whenever it wants to. Ping! Here I am! Decide!